The July Rain started in August
On August 7, 1967, the film “July Rain” by Marlene Hutsiev was released on the screens of the USSR.
Our readers are probably aware that talking about films included in our Golden Thousand, we give data on the number of awards obtained by the movie, box office, laudatory, reviews of film critics ... So, but in this case there were no awards this film, because it was not nominated for any festivals. Data on box office is virtually absent. At least in Russian-language sources. And on IMDB there is such a figure: $ 1,461. And that’s all that the film earned outside our homeland.
The question is quite natural: on what basis was this film included in the Golden Thousand? The film was released in a very limited number of copies - only 160 copies. And this is for the entire Soviet Union. And as a result, in the first year, over 3 million Soviet moviegoers (only!) were able to watch this film. Purely for the sake of statistics, this means that there were 19,375 viewers per copy. Is it a lot or a little? It depends on what you compare it with. For example, in 1971, also in a limited release, after more than 4 years of lying on the shelf, the film by Andrei Tarkovsky "Andrey Rublev" was released. I don't think our readers need to be reminded that this film is recognized as a masterpiece of all time all over the world. Suffice it to remind you that there are only 3 Russian-language films in the top 250 IMDB list. One of them is "Andrey Rublev". So, it was released in 277 copies. And it was watched in the Soviet Union in the first year by 2.9 million moviegoers. That is, one copy had a little less than 10,5 thousand viewers. So compare the popularity among the audience of these two films.
And more. 66% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users, i.e., every two out of three gave this film a rating of 8 or higher. Taking these indicators into account, the rating of the film, calculated according to the FilmGourmand’s Methodology, is 7.824. And it ranks 950th in the Golden Thousand.
... And what is in this film so special that Soviet officials in culture and, in particular, in cinematography, did not like and made them then, in the mid-60s, to limit the possibilities of Soviet moviegoers, and foreign ones, to get to know this movie? These claims were most clearly formulated by Rostislav Yurenev, one of the founders of Soviet film criticism, one of the founders of the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR, a member of its Board, Chairman of the film criticism section. In his so-called "open letter" published in "Soviet Culture" on August 29, 1967, you can read such reviews about the film: "wretched passions, languid languor of the heroes of the film do not cause me interest, but despondency", "The main characters they couldn’t do anything, they couldn’t even find out their relations", "weakness and, I would say, the pettiness of the script’s dramaturgy", "Overloaded, worn-out phonogram depresses", "I carefully looked at young faces. They are different - beautiful and ugly, smart and stupid, but most of these people have a cold indifference, alienation, boredom", "The pretentiousness of directing, the formlessness of drama and the indistinctness of thought", and so on.
What is curious: approximately the same characteristics of the film can be found in some (fortunately, very few) reviews of quite modern authors published on Kinopoisk. And the most paradoxical thing is that very similar conclusions are caused by completely opposite reasons. If Soviet officials in the person of Yurenev compare “July Rain” with Marlen Khutsiev’s previous masterpiece “I Am Twenty” and don’t find in it, in “Rain”, the anticipated romanticism, optimism, confidence in tomorrow and other things that communist ideology was so proud of then the contemporary critics of “July Rain”, judging by their reviews, either did not see “I Am Twenty” at all, or simply do not correlate these two films as two parts of the one dilogy.
Meanwhile, these two films must be watched in a row. Well, or with a very short time interval. And while keeping in mind that work on "I Am Twenty" began in 1959. The height of the thaw. Three years before, the cult of Stalin’s personality was debunked. Two years before that, the World Festival of Youth and Students was held in Moscow. The year before, Moscow again hosted the first Tchaikovsky competition, at which - oh, Miracle! – American won, Van Cliburn. Etc. And it is from here - romanticism, optimism, confidence in the future. Still very timid, but nonetheless noticeable.
And "July Rain" - is already 1966. This is when a lot has turned back. This is when the creations of Andrey Konchalovsky, Andrey Tarkovsky, Kira Muratova, Alexander Askoldov, etc., etc. started or are about to begin to slowly lay down on the shelves. This is what Marlen Khutsiev felt with his special scent of a talented artist. And it is from here "wretched passions, languid languor, despondency" and so on. But not as the weaknesses of the dramaturgy and directing of the film, but as a characteristic of the era that has begun. The era, which was later called in one word - "stagnation". And this is precisely what caused the hatred of the Soviet communist "cultural" bureaucracy. And that’s exactly what every two of three moviegoers around the world understood and guessed and why they praised this difficult film of Khutsiev.
In conclusion, I would like to bring a fragment from the article by Valery Kichin, dedicated to the work of Marlen Khutsiev as a whole: "In the " I Am Twenty" with its glee of youth, the hero is still very dimly felt the deficiency of the vitamin important for life: the romantically ideal that lived in music and poetry drowned in the vulgarity of the edifications of the elders and the idle talk of peers. In the "July Rain", the idle talk was already filling life, rational cynicism supplanted romance, and it remained like the smile of a Cheshire cat, only in the voice of a stranger who permanent called the heroine. ... Everything that was alive and full of hope, will go back to the slogan, poster, to the St. George ribbon on the "Hundai".